Jonathan Haughton

• PhD
• Professor (Full) at Suffolk University

Public works (PW) programs have become increasingly popular in Africa and elsewhere. They are seen as contributing to the social safety net in rural areas, and as a way to help households build assets. The authors seek to measure the impact of Rwanda’s Vision 2020 Umurenge (VUP) PW program, using data from the 2016/2017 Integrated Household Survey....

Opinion leaders and policy makers in the United States have turned their focus to the corporate income tax, which now has the highest statutory rate in the developed world. Using a dynamic computable general equilibrium model (the “NCPA-DCGE Model”), we simulate alternative policies for reducing the U.S. corporate income tax. We find that reduction...

One of the three components of Rwanda’s flagship anti-poverty programme, Vision 2020 Umurenge (VUP), is the provision of credit to relatively poor households, nearly all of them farmers. In this paper we estimate the impact of the programme using high-quality household survey data from 2013/2014 and 2016/2017. Using the panel data, the double-diffe...

This study estimates the causal effect of Rwanda’s unconditional cash transfer program (VUP-Direct Support) on the incidence of poverty, the poverty gap, and household food and non-food expenditure for direct support recipients. Our empirical analysis applies four matching methods to data from the 2013/14 household survey in order to estimate the p...

When one of Jonathan Haughton's students set out to understand the recent rise in inflation in Venezuela, they first had to wrangle with some outliers that threatened to create a misleading impression When one of Jonathan Haughton's students set out to understand the recent rise in inflation in Venezuela, they first had to wrangle with some outlier...

France has a long tradition of using statistical (choropleth) maps, which use shading to represent the spatial distribution of a variable, such as population, by department. Such maps lead the observer to underestimate the importance of urban areas, especially Paris. A solution that complements the choropleth map is to create a cartogram, which del...

Business analytics is the application of statistical and quantitative analysis, as well as formal modeling, to decision making. This book examines under what circumstances and with which techniques one can reasonably infer cause and effect in a business setting and use the insight to drive business decisions. The book is rooted in realistic and imp...

In 2009, migrant workers in the two major cities of Vietnam, Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City, earned 42% less per hour than did non-migrant (“resident”) workers. We seek to explain this gap using data from a carefully-designed urban poverty survey undertaken in 2009 by the General Statistics Office. We use the method proposed by Brown, Moon, and Zoloth,...

We explore the relationship between inequality and entrepreneurial activity. Drawing on cross-sectional data from a largescale survey of the economic conditions of individuals across India, we develop a number of dimensions of inequality to explore empirically how inequality interacts with entrepreneurship, operationalized as self-employment or as...

Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, the Democratic and Republican candidates for President of the U.S. in 2016, proposed several changes in the federal tax code. Hillary Clinton would add a personal income tax surcharge of 4% on high annual incomes, limit the tax benefits of non-charitable deductions, set a minimum tax rate of 30% on taxpayers earnin...

The two major candidates in the 2016 presidential election made sharply different proposals for reforming the Federal tax code. Donald Trump proposed cutting taxes to provide "tax relief for middle-class Americans", and lowering corporation taxes to boost economic growth, while Hillary Clinton proposed modest increases in taxes on high-income Ameri...

By replacing the current income tax with a national sales tax, the FairTax proposal would end the double taxation of saving inherent in the existing tax code and, by doing so, raise output, employment, investment and capital stock relative to the benchmark economy. While these positive effects would be felt almost immediately, the FairTax is very m...

This paper explores the extent measures taken by the government of Thailand helped households cope with shocks caused by the 2009 recession. A counterfactual was created by: quantifying the effects of the shocks (to tourism and exports); applying a Social Accounting Matrix multiplier analysis to simulate the indirect and induced effects; and mappin...

Income and income inequality increased substantially in the UK during the industrial revolution. Income inequality was the highest around 1880.This triggered enactments of more egalitarian tax and transfer system, which halved income inequality by the 1960s. Inequality has risen again with fiscal system reforms in the last five decades. By analysin...

Approximately 600 undergraduates completed an introductory business statistics course in 2013 in one of two learning environments at Suffolk University, a mid-sized private university in Boston, Massachusetts. The comparison group completed the course in a traditional classroom-based environment, whereas the treatment group completed the course in...

The Thailand village fund (VF) is the second-largest microcredit scheme in the world. Nearly 80 000 elected local VF committees administer loans that reach 30 percent of all households. The value of VF loans has remained steady since 2006, even without new infusions of government funds, and loans go disproportionately to the poor. Based mainly on a...

The adoption, maintenance, and prudent use of budgetary stabilization funds are fundamental financial management precepts, yet the variables that influence the size of these funds are poorly understood. This article contributes to the stabilization fund literature by examining the extent to which variation in stabilization fund balances across muni...

Between 1993 and 1998 Vietnam's GDP grew by 8.9% annually. Recently-available household survey data of high quality show several apparently surprising changes: the total fertility rate fell rapidly from 3.2 to 1.8, son preference has almost disappeared, child stunting fell from 53% to 34% among under-fives, the open unemployment rate is just 1.6%,...

Launched in 2001, the Thailand Village and Urban Community Fund (VF) provided almost US$2 billion – a million baht for each of Thailand's 78,000 villages and wards – to provide working capital for locally-run rotating credit associations. Using data from the Thailand Socioeconomic Surveys of 2002 and 2004, we find that VF borrowers were disproporti...

It is widely believed that the countries of Africa trade relatively little with the outside world, and among themselves, despite an extensive network of regional trade agreements. We examine this proposition by focusing on agricultural trade. Specifically, we ask whether non-tariff barriers (NTBs) are stunting agricultural trade within the Economic...

In 2009, buffeted by the great recession, Thai gross domestic product fell by 2.3 percent. Using monthly data from the socio-economic surveys of 2007-2010, this paper finds, after controlling for household variables, that real consumption per capita rose in 2009 relative to 2008 for most groups, including the poor, urban and rural households, men,...

The Thailand Village Fund is the second-largest microcredit scheme in the world. Nearly 80,000 elected local Village Fund committees administer loans that reach 30 percent of all households. The value of Village Fund loans has remained steady since 2006, even withoutnew infusions of government funds, and loans go disproportionately to the poor. Bas...

The crash of global financial markets in 2008 caused a ripple effect on economic demand and growth worldwide. Export-oriented economies were hit particularly hard, and many governments stepped in quickly with broad-ranging stimulus programs to lessen the effects on households of rising unemployment and falling income. To better understand the role...

It is rarely sufficient simply to present estimates of means, coefficients, or poverty rates that have been calculated based on survey data. We also need measures of the variability of these measures, so that we may judge how much confidence to have in them.

Economists and statisticians are rediscovering geography. Until relatively recently, most economic models essentially ignored spatial variations in data and in relationships; these were not at the heart of the issues that were considered to be interesting.

Most household survey data come from a single cross-section of households surveyed at a single point in time. This is useful if the purpose is to get a snapshot of income or poverty, and it does allow for a detailed analysis – for instance, of the proximate determinants of health or malnutrition or income. However, it is rarely possible to get an a...

It is tempting, but wrong, to believe that graphical techniques have little to offer for serious researchers in economics, statistics, or policy analysis. Their true power comes from the ability of the eye to discern patterns in a graph that are not clearly evident from lists of numbers or tabulated statistics. In Tufte’s pithy phrase, “graphics re...

In the classical (or frequentist) approach to statistical methods, the analyst uses a sample of data to make inferences about the value of fixed but unknown population parameters. Among other things, this allows one to construct confidence intervals. Suppose, for example, we wish to estimate a proportion p, say a poverty rate, from a simple random...

Well over 200 years ago, Adam Smith wrote his classic An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. Of course interest in causality goes back much further: Democritus, the pre-Socratic “laughing philosopher,” wrote, “I would rather discover one causal law than be King of Persia.”

Household survey data are generated by sampling, and cannot be interpreted successfully unless the sampling has been done correctly.

Household surveys can provide a great deal of information about incomes, spending, crops grown, and other household and individual characteristics. This detail comes at a cost: given the expense of surveying each household, the number of households sampled is typically fairly modest, rarely exceeding 10,000. Samples of this size are adequate for es...

We are often interested in modeling the time that elapses between one event and another – for instance, between one birth and the next, between a medical treatment and recovery, or between losing a job and finding the next one. Duration models are concerned with describing and explaining these spells.

A government sets up a scheme for extending microcredit to farmers; or builds an irrigation canal; or provides free textbooks to 10-year-olds; or introduces supplemental nutrition for pregnant mothers; or strengthens the social security net with a food-for-work program.

We are often interested in grouping observations. Whenever we report statistics broken down by expenditure quintile, or by region, or by household size, we are gathering observations into clusters. The purpose is to help make more sense of the data, to create more order out of a potentially chaotic mass of information.

Nearly all regression analysis begins by estimating a linear model of the form:$$ \begin{array}{ll} {y_i} = {\beta_0} + {\beta_1}{x_{{i1}}} + {\beta_2}{x_{{i2}}} + \cdots + {\beta_k}{x_{{ik}}} + {\varepsilon_i} \\={{{\mathbf{x\prime}}}_i}\beta + {\varepsilon_i}, \end{array} $$ (4.1)where \( \beta = ({\beta_0},{\beta_1}, \ldots, {\beta_k})\prime \)...

The measurement of poverty and inequality is surprisingly intricate. The purpose of this chapter is to provide a self-contained overview of the issues that arise when trying to measure poverty. The virtue of this chapter is concision; for more extensive treatments, one might start with the Handbook by Haughton and Khandker ( 2009), or the classic e...

This chapter reviews the essentials of regression analysis. For most readers it will be a refresher that can be skimmed quickly; it provides a concise, self-contained coverage of topics that are the staple of any good course on econometrics.

Since its inception in 1991, the Egyptian Social Fund for Development (SFD) has spent about US$600 million supporting microcredit, and financing community development and infrastructure. Applying propensity-score matching using household survey data for 2004/05, this paper finds that SFD programmes have had clear and measurable effects, in the expe...

It is widely believed that the countries of Africa trade relatively little with the outside world, and among themselves, despite an extensive network of regional trade agreements. We examine this proposition by focusing on agricultural trade. Specifically, we ask whether non-tariff barriers (NTBs) are stunting agricultural trade within ECOWAS, a gr...

Among recent proposals for a radical overhaul of the U.S. tax system, the FairTax plan is perhaps the most prominent. It would replace most current federal taxes on income and transfers of wealth with a national retail sales tax levied at a rate of 23 percent of the tax-inclusive price, and would avoid taxing poor households by providing a cash “pr...

The Impact Evaluation Series has been established in recognition of the importance of impact evaluation studies for World Bank operations and for development in general. The series serves as a vehicle for the dissemination of findings of those studies. Papers in this series are part of the Bank's Policy Research Working Paper Series. The papers car...

This paper evaluates the impact of the Thailand Village and Urban Revolving Fund on household expenditure, income, and assets. The revolving fund was launched in 2001 when the Government of Thailand promised to provide a million baht (about $22,500) to every village and urban community in Thailand as working capital for locally-run rotating credit...

This paper seeks to answer how best might the standard of living of the large number of poor farmers living in the small rice-growing areas scattered throughout Peninsular Malaysia be improved? The analysis is based on the results of a series of sample surveys, undertaken by the Malaysian Department of Agriculture during 1976-80. In the 1960s and 1...

This study examines the disparities in living standards between and among the different ethnic groups in Vietnam. Using data from the Vietnam Living Standards Surveys and 1999 Census, we show that 'majority' Kinh and Hoa households have substantially higher living standards than 'minority' households from Vietnam's 52 other ethnic groups. While the...

As specified in Congressional bill H.R. 25/S. 25, the FairTax is a proposal to replace the federal personal income tax, corporate income tax, payroll (FICA) tax, capital gains, alternative minimum, self-employment, and estate and gifts taxes with a single-rate federal retail sales tax. The FairTax also provides a prebate to each household based on...

The rising economic value of Outer Continental Shelf (OCS) waters, for oil and gas as well as wind farms, has attracted the attention of abutting states. Thus Louisiana, faced with dwindling revenues from the oil and gas severance tax and high costs of reconstruction after Hurricane Katrina, is again considering the merits of an oil and gas process...

This paper examines the incidence of taxation in Vietnam, using data from the Living Standards Survey of 1997-1998 and an input-output matrix for 1997. The tax system in 1998 was slightly progressive, taking the equivalent of 7.8percent of spending for households in the lowest, and 10.3percent from households in the highest expenditure quintile. Th...

This paper tests Friedman's hypothesis that increased variability in the growth of money supply causes velocity to decline, using Egyptian data from the period 1960-99. The monetary aggregates M1 and M2 are decomposed into anticipated and unanticipated components and the variability of money growth is computed as the standard deviation of five year...

This paper examines the impact of the 1993 Land Law of Vietnam which gave households the power to exchange, transfer, lease, inherit and mortgage their land-use rights. We use household surveys before and after the law was passed, together with the considerable variation across provinces in the speed of implementation of the reform to identify the...

Unemployment rates vary widely at the sub-regional level. We seek to explain why such variation occurs, using data for 174 districts in the Midi-Pyrénées region of France for 1990–1991. A set of explanatory variables is derived from theory and the voluminous literature. The best model includes a correction for spatially autocorrelated errors. Unemp...

ABSTRACT InDecember,2001 a bilateral trade agreement ,(BTA) between ,Vietnam and the United States

This study examines the latest quantitative evidence on disparities in living standards between and among the different ethnic groups in Vietnam. Using data from the 1998 Vietnam Living Standards Survey and 1999 Census, we show that Kinh and Hoa ("majority") households have substantially higher living standards than "minority" households from Vietn...

In Vietnam almost a quarter of adults worked in nonfarm household enterprises in 1998. Based on household panel data from the Vietnam Living Standards Surveys of 1993 and 1998, the authors find some evidence that operating an enterprise leads to greater affluence. The data show that nonfarm household enterprises are most likely to be operated by ur...

this paper.

Since it committed itself to reform in late 1986, Vietnam has made a rapid transition from a planned to a market-driven economy. One of the first concrete steps towards reform was to promulgate a foreign investment law in 1988. The effect has been remarkable; in 1996, foreign investors committed themselves to projects worth $8.8 billion, in an econ...

A common problem in direct marketing is to identify which physicians are the best prospects for an intervention that would encourage them to prescribe a drug. The standard procedure is to measure how far their prescribing behavior falls short of the level predicted by a regression line. We suggest that a better approach is to determine how far they...

Son preference is widespread although not universal. Where it occurs it may lead to higher fertility rates. Ideally son preference should be measured in the context of a hazards or parity progression model of fertility, or a logistic model of contraceptive use. Such models require large amounts of survey data, particularly to measure the covariates...

Unemployment rates vary widely at the sub-regional level. We seek to explain why such variation occurs, using data for 174 districts in the Midi-Pyrenees region of France for 1990-91. A set of explanatory variables is derived from theory and the voluminous literature.

ABSTRACT Excisetaxes, notably on tobacco and petroleum products and on alcoholic beverages, raise revenue equivalent to 1.9 percent of gross domestic product in Sub-Saharan Africa. Their importance,varies widely and inexplicably across countries, and shows no trend over time. In principle, excise taxes are good revenue sources,cheap to administer a...

According to data collected by the Vietnam Living Standards Survey 1992-93, total fertility was 3.2. This level is low for such a poor country, and reflects a continued fall from 5.6 in 1979, uninterrupted by the rapid transition from a planned to a market economy. Oddly, the proximate causes of the low total fertility, including contraceptive user...

UNICEF has written that widespread malnutrition in Vietnam stems not from the insufficient production of food but from problems of availability distribution and demand. The authors estimated two models of child nutrition using data from a representative and relatively large sample of Vietnamese households surveyed in 1992-93. No evidence was found...

Son preference is strong in Vietnam, according to attitudinal surveys and studies of contraceptive prevalence and birth hazards. These techniques assume a single model is valid for all families, but it is more plausible that son preference is found for some, but not all, families. Heterogeneous preferences may be addressed with a mixture model. Thi...

Gasoline consumption creates externalities, through pollution, road congestion, accidents, and import dependence. Mat effect would a higher gasoline tax have on the related magnitudes: gasoline consumption, miles driven, and road fatalities? In this paper, separate models are estimated for gasoline use per mile, miles driven per driver, and fatalit...

This paper undertakes a cross-country analysis of the determinants of VAT compliance, using data from a sample of 17 OECD countries for 1987. An index of compliance is constructed and regressed against variables which represent characteristics of the countries and their VAT rates. It is found that (a) a higher VAT rate is associated with lower comp...

This article assesses the strength of son preference in Vietnam, as reflected in fertility behavior. It formulates and estimates a proportional hazards model applied to birth intervals, and a contraceptive prevalence model, using household survey data from 2,636 ever-married women aged 15-49 with at least one living child who were interviewed for t...

The Federal Reserve Bank reports that approximately $300 billion worth of United States currency was in circulation in 1992. Yet based on household survey and other information, households and firms in the country claim to hold only a fifth of this total. A recent article by Sprenkle argues that the "missing currency" is largely held outside the Un...

In this paper we are concerned with the twin problems of fitting a harmonic model to a time series, and then using information criteria to determine how many harmonic components to include in the series. Let Y(t), t = 0, ±1, ±2,… be a time series. A harmonic model has the form $$ Y(t) = {\alpha_0} + \sum\limits_{{j = 1}}^k {{\alpha_j}\;\cos \left(...

In this paper we present a novel methodology for estimating harmonic models in time series. The amplitude density function is derived from an inversion of the spectral representation of the series and is found to have the property of strong consistency. It is used in conjunction with non-linear least squares regression in an iterative procedure to...

The estimated responsiveness of farmers to changes in the prices of output or inputs is in general very sensitive to the econometric model used. Using cross-section survey data for farms in marginal rice-growing districts in West Malaysia price elasticities based on estimated input demand equations derived from a quadratic restricted profit functio...

Despite the belief that single-cropping padi farmers constitute one of the very poorest groups in Peninsular Malaysia, little is known in detail about the level and sources of income of this group, or about the determinants of this income. Such knowledge is of considerable practical importance, for in its absence it is impossible to gauge the effec...